Essays [full text]

Satirical Novels

"History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place." - Gore Vidal

Five years ago today, Vidal died at the age of 87 from complications of pneumonia.

Of course, history is more than idle gossip. Also note that Vidal cited "history," not the notion of the discrete historical fact. After all, it's not merely idle gossip that Vidal did, in fact, die five years ago today. And the myriad resources of historical analysis in general don't all come down to so much idle gossip. Vidal was being provocative, as he often was.

Nonetheless, there's more than a little truth in what Vidal says here about history, depending on what kind of history is in question.

Especially regarding history of the pre-modern era, many sources include literal gossip and essentially report it as such. But it's also true that many things reported as fact in those eras cannot easily if ever be independently verified and might well have been just gossip. One thinks of some of the salacious details related in the works of Plutarch and Suetonius.

Probably, Vidal's larger point was that the truth of the past, including received, official history, can never be completely known. There is no omnipresent and omniscient historical recorder, something capturing forever every moment of human action on earth and the thoughts of those involved. Subjectivity and fading memories factor into the imperfection of the historical record and in part decide what is and isn't recorded in the first place.

More than likely, the subjectivity of history is something Vidal hoped to stress by very often relying on the first-person point of view in his historical novels, including an epistolary approach in Julian and using using diary entries like in Burrand transcription like in and Creation.

I have written lately about Pearl Harbor. Now I get the same question over and over: Isn't this exactly like Sunday morning 7 December 1941?

No, it's not, I say. As far as we now know, we had no warning of last Tuesday's attack. Of course, our government has many, many secrets which our enemies always seem to know about in advance but our people are not told of until years later, if at all. President Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to attack us at Pearl Harbor. I describe the various steps he took in a book, The Golden Age. We now know what was on his mind: coming to England's aid against Japan's ally, Hitler, a virtuous plot that ended triumphantly for the human race.

Japan looked for a compromise. We looked for war. The Japanese ambassadors to the US, Kurusu and Nomura, were treated to a series of American ultimatums that concluded, November 26, with the following order: “The government of Japan will withdraw all military, naval, air and police forces from China and Indo-China” as well as renounce the tripartite Axis agreement. It was then, as Lincoln once said on a nobler occasion, the war came.

Most of lower Manhattan and the Financial District were burned down on the freezing night of December 17th, 1835. In Gore Vidal's meticulously-researched novel, Burr, the protagonist Charlie Schuyler, the morning after the great blaze, describes the destruction during the previous night:

Like everyone else in the city, I was awake the whole night. Half the First Ward has burned down.

It was Dante's Hell: ice and fire together. A horrible racket of bells pealing, of fire-engines clattering, of houses collapsing. At midnight the sky was like a red dawn. Today every New Yorker who knows how to read mentions The Last Days of Pompeii.

I am thankful that I won't be required to describe what I saw. Memory too crowded with fiery images. Wall Street in flames. A freezing wind full of fire--an anomaly.

Suddenly the new Merchants' Exchange vanishes in a long wave of flame. A moment later I was able to see through the walls to the statue beneath the dome of Alexander Hamilton [in the church graveyard.]

From nowhere, a half-dozen young sailors raced into the building and tried to save the statue. They pulled the figure off its pedestal but then the police forced them out of the building just in time for with a hissing sigh the dome fell in and Hamilton was seen no more (his would-be rescuer was a young officer from the Navy Yard--a banker's son, who else?).

A group of Irish approached [Leggett and me] and said, "They'll be making no more of them five-per-cent dividends, with they now?".... Leggett grinned and gave [the speaker] a thumbs-up.

In the side streets the shopkeepers were gloomily digging among the ashes to see what the fire had spared. In Pearl Street there are miles of scorched cloth stacked on the side-walls. In Fulton Street furniture. Nearly every street like an open bazaar of ruined good. The poor steal whatever they can, particularly food...as do the pigs, who have declared themselves a national holiday and are now rampant.... The only contented sound in the city is their squeaking and snorting as they turn up delicacies where once were taverns, grocery shops, homes."

After winning control of the House in 2010, Republicans opened the next session of Congress by reading the Constitution. They were drawing on the widespread conservative sense that the U.S. under President Barack Obama was drifting from the principles of its founding leaders and documents.

The Tea Party, named for the most famous anti-tax revolt in American history, was the clearest expression of this Revolutionary nostalgia, and for many voters this year, 2012 will be an election about returning to what they see as the values of 1787.

In “All the King’s Men,” however, Willie Stark learns to dismiss the idealized portraits of the Founding Fathers in American history textbooks: “I bet things were just like they are now. A lot of folks wrassling round,” he scoffs. That line could serve as the epigraph to one of the most entertaining novels ever written about American politics, Gore Vidal’s “Burr.” Vidal, who died July 31 at the age of 86, published what many regard as his best novel in 1973, when Vietnam and Watergate were dealing Americans’ confidence in their government a series of blows from which it has yet to recover......What is left to admire is the sheer audacity and energy of the founders, their 18th-century scale and scope. They may have been scoundrels, Vidal suggests, but the country doesn’t even make scoundrels like that anymore.

The reviewer, Adam Kirsch, provides a fair summary of Burr, and he's to be applauded for turning our attention to the novel in light of the hagiographic impulse many Americans have relative to the Founding Fathers.

However, Vidal modeled Burr the character less on himself than Kirsch suspects. As pointed out on HuffPost in "The Legacy of Gore Vidal," Vidal had an entire library of 200 books on Burr and his contemporaries and manuscript letters that Aaron Burr had written shipped from the US to Ravello, where Vidal was writing, to supplement standard editions. Much of the library and manuscripts he'd purchased as a lot from a rare manuscripts and books dealer. Vidal studied Burr's voice carefully, and the voice in the novel is certainly more Burr's than Vidal's.

And Kirsch arguably suggests that the novel's characterizations of the Founding Fathers are far-fetched. They aren't, especially given that Vidal rarely agrees completely with his narrators.

Kirsch cites Burr's description of George Washington as broad-bottomed. Well, he was, and it's rather obvious in the painted portraits of Washington, and contemporaries noted it. (Note a soldier's description of Washington being "broad across the hips.")

The Founding Fathers were indeed ambitious men on the make. It's painfully obvious, really. And why shouldn't they have been? The Revolution was in many regards more like a civil war fought against the British Empire so colonists might better craft an empire of their own. Colonists' compaints about lack of Parliamentary representation rested alongside their complaints that London's policies towards the Indians were too lenient. (Native Americans were under Crown Protection.) And only a few years before such complaints, American commentators were forecasting that the British Empire's capital, perhaps the throne itself, would move from London to America in due course. Empire was in the air...in America as much as in the halls of Westminster, and the Founders wanted a piece of the action.

James M. Lindsay of the Council of Foreign Relations and formerly of the National Security Council, who may know something of what global leadership looks like, examines Rep. Michele Bachmann, candidate for President of the United States. He notes that Bachmann "switched to the Republican Party after reading a book by Gore Vidal that she thought was 'mocking our founding fathers.'"

Commenter Derek Wain objects to Lindsay's overview:

There is...an obvious and clumsy attempt to Palinize Bachmann.... Lindsay’s patent political propaganda brings to mind a Chinese saying: "Why you point one finger at me, you point 2 fingers at yourself."

Oh, for the waning days of Chinese stereotyping and of Americans' innumeracy, we live in hope. But in the land of Wain's Bachmann and Bachmann's Wain, it's probably best to temper hope.

Bachmann's simplistic view of Vidal's novels (on different occasions she's cited 1876and Burr, only one of which has to do with our Founding Fathers) reveals her literalistic mindset--or "worldview," a not-new and once-academic term now trendy. She hadn't the sense or ability to read an imaginary first-person narrative as being subjective, even purposefully untrustworthy through the novelist's craft. (An elderly Aaron Burr provides that perspective in Burr, Charles Schuyler in 1876, and both characters are clearly flawed, each a mix informed insight but also bias.) It's Literature 101 kind of stuff, and she didn't even get it, because the literalistic mind can't; epistemological fundamentalism doesn't mesh as well with subtly or even complexity as it does with pigeon-holing and inflexibility. It is a mindset that allows her to be comforted in pre-scientific conservative evangelical religiosity. It is mindset a bit like the electrician's comparator: reality with only two modes to offer and completely committed to either all one or all the other. Such black-and-white thinking is not suitable for the job of head of state of our republic in a complex global era.

Of course, just because it's unsuitable doesn't mean it's impossible to be operative in (whisper it) a Bachamann presidential administration. Certainly it was the case that unsuitable mental habits did not disqualify other candidates from winning the presidency.

[In Lincoln,] Vidal has succeeded magnificently in imagining much of what [Walt] Whitman leaves out [of his book, Leaves of Grass, in its Memories of President Lincoln section]. The Lincoln invented by Vidal is a man of Shakespearean dimensions, full of doubts and mixed motives, a closet dictator who started the Civil War as much out of a desire to trump the glory of the Founders as out of any nobler instincts. Whitman’s Lincoln is a cartoon Christ-figure: he died not to remind us of our sins but to inflame our self-righteous sense of America’s greatness. Vidal’s Lincoln is a much more interesting person. His death isn’t seen as the ultimate glorious sacrifice to the Union’s victory. Instead, he seems to will his own murder as a guilt-ridden, inadequate atonement for all the blood he has spilled in the pursuit of his relentless compulsion to amass unprecedented glory for himself.

By the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg, it was nearly impossible to know from the commemoration why the war had happened or who had won. The year was 1913, and the President was Woodrow Wilson, the first Southerner to hold the office since 1850. Wilson had been a historian before entering politics, and his book A History of the American People was tinged with Lost Cause interpretations. He described the Ku Klux Klan as "an empire of the South" created by men "roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation." It was no surprise, then, that his remarks at Gettysburg completely avoided slavery. Instead he chose to talk about "gallant men in blue and gray ... our battles long past, our quarrels forgotten."

April 12, 2011--the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Sumter. Gore Vidal termed our republic "The United States of Amnesia," and in a well-crafted dramatized manner makes clear in his novel Lincoln that while slavery was the main cause of the Civil War, on a day-to-day basis during the war, slavery was rarely the overwhelming issue inside military headquarters and The White House. There was much going on, and situations and motivations were complicated for nearly every historic actor of the bloody drama, whether it was Lincoln himself, Sec. of War Stanton, Sec. of Treasury Chase, or even one actual actor named Booth.

In his novel Hollywood, Vidal also touches on President Wilson's sympathy to the "Lost Cause" school of interpretation about the Civil War mentioned in the Time magazine article linked to above.

Visit to a Small Planet (1957) ISBN 0-8222-1211-0The Best Man (1960)On the March to the Sea (1960–1961, 2004)Romulus (adapted from Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1950 play Romulus der Große) (1962)Weekend (1968)Drawing Room Comedy (1970)An Evening with Richard Nixon (1970) ISBN 0-394-71869-0On the March to the Sea (2005)